In a little more than two months, the Ten Network turns 50. What should be an occasion for celebration will draw little cheer, as Australia's youngest commercial network is steered to the brink of ruin by poor management, with the television industry, the media and its shrinking audience looking on in horror.

If this is a mid-life crisis, then by Jesus it's a doozy.

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An optimist might say at this point the only way for Ten is up. But an answer to the most pertinent question on the table - where to now? - still seems elusive as the network itself is paralysed between a perfect storm of programming and revenue failures. Neither can fully kick into gear without some certainty from the other. And neither - excluding the network's robust drama slate - looks solid enough at present to kick into gear.

This week Ten has announced very deep cuts: 150 staff, bringing the total lost since 2012 to 250, and, unsurprisingly, the cancellation of its second failed push into breakfast: Wake Up. Ten has also taken the knife to its program supply agreements with US studios 20th Century Fox and CBS Studios in a bid to reduce its costs. But it is a complex message to send the market: a television network which ostensibly cannot afford to buy programs is a curious beast indeed.

The decision on Wake Up is long overdue. With its prime-time schedule in tatters, Ten has effectively wasted two years fighting fires on two fronts when all of its resources should have been directed towards the main game: stemming its audience and revenue losses in prime-time.

The most heartbreaking part of Ten's predicament, particularly to those who work there, is that so much of it is self-inflicted. After three disastrous years with now-departed interim CEO and chairman Lachlan Murdoch's hand on the tiller, Australia's perennial third network was pushed to fourth place behind the national broadcaster, the ABC, taking revenue, share value and the loyalty and respect of its once-core 16-to-39-year-old audience with it.

Beginning with the removal of veteran programmer David Mott in 2012, Ten has systematically lost layer after layer of actual expertise. Now, in Ten's upper management, aside from programmer Beverly McGarvey and news boss Peter Meakin, meaningful television experience is dangerously thin.

Ten's current CEO Hamish McLennan has also scored two astonishing own goals: describing the network's tent-pole entertainment formats as "ageing program franchises" whilst they are still in play and, during a court appearance, revealing he has no idea who programs the ABC's channels. The former is not incorrect, but is a misstep on the eve of launching a sixth series of MasterChef; the latter creates a damaging perception that Ten's leadership lacks basic knowledge about the TV landscape it inhabits.

Central to the issue for Ten is that its decline is not consistent with the broadcast sector at large, as tempting as it might be to suggest it is. It is true that television, like all media, has revenue issues and channel audiences are fracturing globally, but both free-to-air and pay television remain very robust businesses. Seven and Nine's franchises - some of them as old as Ten's - are delivering huge audience volumes, and Foxtel's balance sheet is healthy, even if it is fighting to lift its subscriber base.

In the United States and the United Kingdom, the television economy supports five commercial broadcasters plus hundreds of cable channels. Australia's more modest ambition of three commercial broadcasters should not be an economic impossibility.

In truth, while much analysis dwells on failures such as The Shire and Everybody Dance Now, Ten's biggest stumbles were giving up AFL rights to (unsuccessfully) chase the rugby league and failing to secure the rights to the talent format The Voice, the natural successor to Ten's iconic Australian Idol. The former was a fool's errand, obvious to anyone who understood the zeal with which Nine approaches its ownership of the sport. The latter was simply lousy negotiation.

In television, there are no panaceas. Ten's recruitment of Seven executives James Warburton, Adam Boland and, nearly, John Stephens is proof of that. Even the one they did manage to get, news boss Peter Meakin, hit the nail on the head when he asked whether Ten "need(s) an admiral when they don't have a fleet". Before Ten takes on the challenge of developing new content they must get over the hurdle of being able to recruit talent in an economy where few would now be willing to take on a gig.

Ten has been at this crossroads before, two decades ago, when it foundered, and went into receivership. But what separates those two existential crises by an unbridgeable gulf is that last time Ten had the stewardship of one of Australian television's best executives, the legendary and much-loved Mike Lattin, and a youth-chasing commercial strategy which sailed the network perfectly into a buoyant economy.